Have the Lahore Church Bombings and the Lynchings that Followed Revealed Rifts Within Pakistan's Christian Community?

It was a little after 11 am on Sunday, 15 March 2015. Asher Naveed, a member of the parish council and a voluntary security guard at Lahore’s Christ Church in Youhanabad, was sitting at the back of the church with seven other members of the security team. Glancing at his watch, Naveed realized that the sermon had gone on for longer than usual; by now, congregants who did not want to join in the Communion would ordinarily be leaving the church. One man, his wife and daughter, snuck out from the pews, headed towards Naveed, and asked him to open the church doors so they could leave.

Less than a minute after the family walked out, Naveed heard the man’s motorbike rev up, followed by the sound of gunshots.

“I heard five or six shots, in quick succession,” Naveed recalled when he spoke to me. In the few seconds of silence that followed, one of guards headed to a small door near the entrance. “We thought it was some miscreants causing a commotion outside, or at worst, a shooting between people from the neighbourhood (Youhanabad),” Naveed said. The guard cracked the door open and peered outside; seconds later, he was swept off his feet and thrown backwards into the church by the force of an explosion.

“Everything was grey,” Naveed recalled. “I remember thinking, as I looked outside the door that had been blasted open, that our congregants had come to church dressed in such beautiful, colourful clothes. But I could see none of that colour, everything had turned grey.”

Through the smoke and debris, Naveed told me that he spotted what he thought was the suicide bomber’s leg. “The minute I saw body parts, we closed the door so people would not rush out and see that,” he said. “All I could think of was how the sermon had gone on longer than usual that day. If it hadn’t, imagine how many families would have been outside the church when the bombings took place.” 

The attacks on 15 March were the worst on Pakistan's Christian community since a double suicide bombing at a church in Peshawar in September 2013 that left nearly one hundred people dead. The community—which makes up roughly 2 percent of Pakistan’s population of more than 180 million people—lost nineteen people in the bombings at Christ Church and Roman Catholic Church, located half a kilometer apart in Lahore’s Youhanabad neighbourhood, home to an estimated 100,000 Christians. Two Christians were killed the following day as a panicked driver tried to make her way through a crowd of protestors, running over fourteen people.

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Reverend Rafaqat Sadiq, the pastor at Karachi’s United Presbyterian Church of Pakistan has had a busy week. This coming Sunday, 29 March, will mark Palm Sunday—the final Sunday before Easter, the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ—followed by Holy Thursday, the tail-end of the forty-day Lent period, Good Friday and finally Easter on 5 April. Reverend Sadiq is unsure of what his sermon on Sunday to more than two hundred members of his congregation will be about, but he knows that the message he must deliver is one of peace.

On 15 March, he watched helplessly as the residents of Essa Nagri—Karachi’s largest Christian settlement—took to the streets in anger after news of the two suicide bombings in Lahore broke. However, Karachi’s protests, its blocked roads and the cars that were being pelted with stones, were a blip on the state’s radar compared to the events unfolding in Lahore.

A little after the blasts on Sunday morning, two men, suspected of abetting the bombers, were intercepted by a frenzied mob outside the churches. The men—who may now have proven to be innocent bystanders—were brutally beaten. Bloodied and unconscious, they were covered with scrap wood and set ablaze.

As four thousand protestors fanned out from the low-income neighborhood in protest, nearly five thousand policemen and paramilitary force personnel were deployed to contain the escalating situation in Youhanabad that Sunday. Armed with clubs, the protestors attacked a Metro bus station and pelted vehicles with stones.

The government’s reaction to the ransacking of the bus station—a project spearheaded by the chief minister of Punjab, also the prime minister’s brother, Shahbaz Sharif—is revealing. “Damaging public property the worst kind of terrorism,” the interior minister Chaudhry Nisar stated a day after the attack.

It was a tone-deaf response, but one that echoed the growing backlash against the Christian community in Pakistan. On social media, requests for prayers for the deceased or images of candle-lit vigils were countered with condemnations of the "Christian Taliban." “These people should learn from the parents of the victims of the attack on Army Public School Peshawar who lost more than 145 children but did not harm a single building,” wrote one critic on Twitter, sharing an image of a "Christian mob" allegedly burning the Pakistani flag. “Will the vigil mafia stay silent about this?” When the Pakistani cricket team underperformed in a match on Friday, another commentator tweeted:“These lousy players should be handed over to the Christians of Youhanabad.”

Since the 2013 attack on All Saints Church in Peshawar, which was followed by a series of attacks on places of worship attended by minority groups, Reverend Sadiq told me that he counted on the support of local Muslims from his area to ensure the security of his congregants on days like Palm Sunday when attendance at church is high. “Men from the neighbourhood would come and stand guard with our security volunteers at the church on our special days,” he recounted. “They always told me, ‘Don’t worry, we’re here with you.’” He explained to me that such support was  crucial, not just symbolically, but also literally, as many churches rely on the protection offered by a handful of congregants—some as young as fifteen or sixteen—who volunteer to serve as security guards.

After the lynching of the two Muslim men in Lahore, the reverend voiced his uncertainty about whether those supporters would come to stand with the church’s guards again. He was not hopeful. “I don’t think they will come on Sunday,” he told me. “It will be really hard for them to support us after what happened in Lahore.” The stakes are high. “This week is very important for us and we desperately need security,” he said. “For a terrorist, what could be better than a significant gathering in one place? Anything could happen.”

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Pervez Akhtar, a scrap dealer based in Karachi, received a phone call from his cousin on Sunday morning when the suicide attackers struck. His cousin was trapped inside Christ Church and was unharmed, but his sixty-something-year-old father, Shameem Bhatti, had been standing guard at the door. Bhatti was shot three times before he managed to fire at one of the suicide attackers. The bomb exploded as a result of the gunshot and Bhatti is currently fighting for his life due to injuries caused by the shrapnel from the blast. “Am I scared he won’t survive? Yes, I am, but he was in the house of God when this happened,” Akhtar told me. “If you die for a good cause, your memory will remain. People will pay tribute to my uncle every time they speak of these attacks.”

Akhtar was in Karachi for a special service organised by a former MPA (member of the provincial assembly in Sindh) from Essa Nagri, Michael Javed, in honour of the victims of the attacks. “We have organised this vigil to counter the opinion people have of us right now,” explained Reverend Sadiq. “We have to wage a war for our rights on another front now—that of public opinion.”

“Those two deaths have given birth to something terrible and a very bad message of Christianity was sent out in Lahore,” said Akhtar. “The two men should not have been killed, but handed over to the police. Then we wouldn’t be having the problems we are right now.”

The service, held the evening after the attacks in Lahore, was taking place in the yard outside Javed’s house, which doubles as St Michael’s Grammar Secondary School, the largest school in Essa Nagri. Close to a hundred chairs had been arranged in a semicircle, facing a makeshift stage under the shadow of a large banner. “Down fall terrorism. Down fall suicide bombers. Save the Christians in Pakistan,” it proclaimed.

Outside the circle of chairs, a gaggle of teenage boys were either squatting or sitting on a low stonewall. They squinted at their cellphones in the dying sunlight. There were no streetlights in the vicinity and since the event was yet to start, the generator would only be cranked to life once everyone had gathered, in order to save fuel. When I last visited Javed’s house in 2013, his home was the only one in Essa Nagri that had electricity during a two month period of constant blackouts. Javed had told the other residents of the colony to hook their wires onto his electric cables, using an illegal system called kunda so that they could siphon off his electricity into their homes. On the day of the vigil, as the entire neighbourhood was shrouded in darkness, there was no electricity in Javed’s house either.

The boys took some photos of the banner above the stage, and looked up briefly as the opening hymns of the service began. “What do I think about what happened on Sunday?” quipped one fifteen year old I spoke to. He elbowed the boy sitting next to him. “Ask my partner, he does all the thinking for us,” he retorted as the other boys snickered. The designated voice of the cool kids spouted words bandied about on television. “It was such a terrible tragedy and we condemn it and we are here to pray,” he rattled off.

Most of the boys were quiet: they did not want it to get around that they skipped services that Sunday and all of them asked for their names to not be mentioned. “The crowd should have let the policemen arrest those two men who were killed,” another boy sitting with the group told me. When asked what he thought the policemen would have done to the two men, he answered immediately, “Well, they’d eventually let them go, of course.”

One of the boys seemed worried that his friends were going off script. “Shut the recording and we’ll tell you what we really think,” he urged me. But another skinny teenage boy, his body a comma-shaped curl as he sat on his haunches, was insistent about speaking on the record: “Why does this happen to us? What have we ever done to you to be killed in this way?”

He admitted that the lynching may have been a grave mistake, but that it came from an outpouring of rage against the feeling of constant insecurity the minority groups felt in Pakistan. “People are asking about those two Muslim men who were burned alive, but here’s a question for them—if you are standing behind me and you shove me hard, and I fall over and hit you, is that my fault or yours?”

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The deaths of the two men, a local glass-cutter named Naeem and a garment factory employee named Babar, dredged up reminders of an incident that took place just four months ago in the Kasur district of Punjab, where a majority of Pakistan’s Christian population resides. In November last year, a crowd of nearly thousand villagers in Kot Radha Kishan, just sixty kilometres southwest of Lahore, beat a Christian couple, Shahzad and Shama Masih, accusing them of burning pages from the Quran. The couple was burned alive in the brick kiln where they worked as bonded labourers. Shama was pregnant at the time. In January, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court was told that police officials had silently observed the killings, while other senior officers were asleep in their homes at the time.

Such charges of blasphemy are common in Pakistan and the accusations largely serve political or monetary motives—the accuser’s word trumps all. According to a clause added to the laws in 1986, the penalty for blasphemy, desecration of the Quran or speaking against holy personages—is death, or imprisonment for life. The very first death sentence handed to someone on charges of blasphemy in Pakistan was in 1992, when Gul Masih, a Christian transsexual living in Faisalabad, was accused of pocketing funds slated for the repair of a neighbourhood water tap. While Gul’s lawyer produced several witnesses who swore he had not said or done anything blasphemous, the judge at the time brushed the testimonies aside, saying, “His accuser is a young man of 21, a student of BA and a true Muslim with a beard on his face… I find no reason to disbelieve him.”

The people of Essa Nagri know all too well how quickly even a whisper of “blasphemy” can bring a baying mob to your doorstep. The 24-acre colony, home to more than 45,000 Christians, lies at the edge of an area in Karachi’s Gulshan neighbourhood where the Amn Committee—a banned militant group—holds sway. The colony is encircled by a protective wall which was erected in 2012 after five Christian men were killed in Essa Nagri at the hands of Amn Committee gang members.

A male resident from the neighbourhood told me on the condition of anonymity that the Committee members have persistently sought to encroach upon the colony’s land.  He said that pistol-wielding boys would often ride in on their motorbikes, ransacking churches, ripping up Bibles or mugging residents and shopkeepers. A member of the congregation went on to describe how the Committee had alleged that the protective wall was meant to keep Muslims away from a mosque on the other side. “You Christians just don’t want us to read our prayers,” Committee members reportedly said, building the case for a charge of blasphemy.

Panicked leaders in Essa Nagri nipped this accusation in the bud: they built a gate into the wall and handed the key to the padlocked gate to a Muslim man living on the other side. This trusted intermediary unlocks the gate every day as the call to prayer sounds. However, this hasn’t stopped the Committee from trying to break down the wall, and I was told by the resident that the Christian community here has pooled funds together to purchase guns for volunteer security guards.

At Friday services in Karachi this week, Javed noticed something odd at his neighbourhood church, St Mary’s. Where there were usually three hundred to four hundred congregants, there were now only one hundred and fifty and they were largely women. “Families are telling the boys and men to stay away from services,” Javed explained to me. “They think the terrorists mostly target the men of the community, so they’re sending their women and children to church instead in the hope that no one would think of attacking them.”

The logic may be flawed, but it speaks to the atmosphere of fear among the community, particularly in Lahore and Karachi. In Youhanabad, a group reportedlydaubed black paint on the doors of Christian homes near Muslim-dominated parts of the neighbourhood. “Something is going to happen,” Javed said. “Our people are fleeing Youhanabad—some are going to the extent of selling their homes for whatever pittance they can get—and hiding in other neighbourhoods of Lahore or going to their families in other cities.” He added that pamphlets were distributed near Youhanabad during the week. “These people have started killing Muslims,” it stated, and went on to say, “The churas [a derogatory term used for Christians meaning ‘lowly sweepers’]have woken up and want to fight us.”

Naveed, the volunteer from Christ Church, estimated that up to 30 percent of Youhanabad’s Christian residents had fled, not just in fear, but in order to save their young boys and men as the government had announced that Sunday’s protestors would be punished. “Up to five or six male members of a family have been picked up in one night by the security agencies,” Naveed told me.  Reports state that there have been an estimated 108 arrests so far. “We have received threats, especially via social media, to the effect that, ‘You killed two of ours, now we will kill 100,000 of yours,’” he said.

At the vigil in Karachi, Christian leaders tried hard to erase demarcations between Christians and Muslims. “The Muslims who were killed in Youhanabad were targeted just like us,” Javed told the gathered crowd. He offered a blessing for the army chief Raheel Sharif, the police force and paramilitary Rangers, and added, “The safety of our Muslim brothers in places like Essa Nagri and Youhanabad is our responsibility, just as the safety of our Christian brethren lies in the hands of the Muslims.”

Javed said the Christian community leaders have forbidden all protests against the attacks on the churches. He spent the week meeting with small groups of teenagers from the community in Karachi, appealing to them to not react. He told  me that in one meeting, a boy said, “If our people are burned or killed, their murderers are let off the hook and the policemen who help these criminals are given excellent postings or promotions. So if they don’t defend us, we need to do it for ourselves.”

“We won’t survive it,” Javed responded quietly to the boy. “If we take these people on, they will only win support from those who think we don’t belong in Pakistan.”

Javed’s calls for patience have not met with much success previously. In 2009, whenthe homes of Christian residents of Gojra, a colony in the Toba Tek Singh district of Punjab, were burned and seven people were shot or set alight, Javed pleaded with the young men of Essa Nagri to remain peaceful. In turn, he told me they pelted his house with stones and smashed the windows of his car, accusing him of siding with the attackers.

Trust appears to be flagging in the security system especially after reports emerged that police officials deputed for security at Youhanabad’s churches were engrossed in a cricket match at the time of the attack. “We will have to defend ourselves,” said another young man at one of the meetings Javed held this week. “We are not equal citizens in this country and we will have to fight back.”

However, the police officials I met insisted that all possible security was given to the churches. “The policemen present on the day stopped the suicide bombers from going inside the churches and thus saved more than 1,500 lives,” claimed Punjab Inspector General Mushtaq Sukhera. When he was asked why the police officials did not intervene as the two Muslim men were beaten and burned, he explained, “It was not possible to use force at that time as it could have turned the situation unruly and out of control.”

At the vigil in Karachi, a parked police van hulked at the entrance to Javed’s compound. Ten police officials huddled in front of it, smoking and shooing away any cars that tried to park near the compound’s entrance. A policeman struck a match, held the flame to the cigarette in his mouth, and then, on second thought, lowered it to the wick of a white candle standing in a puddle of its own wax on a wooden table where the vigil would take place. Men and women streamed in and out of the compound’s gates, and steel vats of biryani were carried inside for the post-vigil dinner. No one was checked, there was no security pat-down.

“This is their event,” sub-inspector Ghulam Akbar  said as he justified the apparent laxity, nodding his head towards the compound. “We can’t exactly pat down the women, can we? If they feel there is someone suspicious in there, they should bring him or her to us and we’ll deal with them.” Akbar told me that he did not believe the news about the policemen watching a match in Youhanabad while the suicide bombers strode towards the two churches. “People can say whatever they want, but until my superior tells me that happened, I don’t believe it,” he asserted emphatically. “And anyway, a suicide bomber can strike anywhere, any time, and if he wants to do something, no one can stop him.”

Over the course of the past eleven days after the blast, I spoke to nearly a dozen people from the Christian community who had been witness to either the blast or its aftermath. There appeared to be two different theories about what happened on that Sunday. Many of the younger Christians I spoke with in the weeks after the attack seemed to believe that the lynchings took place at the hands of people fed up with being treated like second-class citizens. “Those bitten have now bitten back,” an editorial in The Express Tribune agreed. But the leaders in the community refused to believe one of their own could have behaved in such a way.

“Before the church services in Youhanabad, locals told us that five or six men carrying sticks entered the neighbourhood,” Javed told me. “They were not recognised by anyone there and we believe they travelled to Lahore from Kasur, on the Indian border.” According to Javed, these men waited until the suicide blasts and then goaded people from Youhanabad to react. “These men were prepped to react to the blasts. They shouted, ‘Catch them! Burn them!’ and pointed to the two men who were grabbed by the crowd,” he said. “They wanted to destabilize Pakistan, they wanted an explosive confrontation between Christians and Muslims.” Reverend Sadiq agreed. “People who want to see the country descend into chaos are trying to make Christians, Hindus and Muslims fight amongst each other,” he said. “They are enemies of the country who want to break it apart by creating rifts between citizens.” He called the men in the crowd “planted agents.”

These explanations seem to echo the government’s statements, in some cases verbatim. For instance, two days after the bombings, Punjab’s chief minister Shahbaz Sharif said, “Those responsible for the attacks wanted to divide the nation.” However, the lack of trust in the government and Christian political representatives has meant that such official statements don’t hold much weight in the Christian community and appear to deepen the rift between the elders in the community and the younger generation.

“It would be fairly accurate to say we have zero representation in the government,” elucidated Javed. As minority members to parliamentary seats are nominated by political parties—as opposed to being chosen from amongst the communities through a ballot—many in the minority community believe it is not popularity but personal wealth or influence that is the criteria here. “Our representatives are deaf and dumb and busy looking after their own businesses. We do not accept the current system of representation and the Christian MPAs are not our elected representatives,” he continued. Right now, a Hindu MPA, Nand Kumar, has promised to table a bill in the assembly for the increased protection of the Christian minority

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Since the bombings, Christ Church in particular has witnessed an increase in the number of congregants coming forward to volunteer as security guards. “Many have been inspired by the actions of Zahid Goga and Akash Bashir, two men who died trying to prevent the suicide bombers from entering the churches,” Naveed explained to me. “There were zero injuries to people inside the church because of these brave men, and I think for many, this has renewed our faith. We feel that we were in a house of God and we were protected.” He added, “If those men could give up their lives for us, then we feel we can and should do the same for others.”

For Reverend Sadiq, this notion of sacrifice appeared to be closely tied to patriotic duty. “God knows what the government is doing and He knows what I am doing. I have to live by the Bible and even if I lose my life doing so, I don’t give a damn,” he told me. He said it was difficult to assuage the doubts of his congregants, especially when they questioned the value of putting one’s life on the line for a country that does not offer them protection or basic rights. “Even if the government does not accept me, I am still Pakistani,” he said.

For now, churches and Christian schools are working to improve security as much as they can. In Christ Church, for instance, CCTVs are being installed on the premises for the first time. Some say this isn’t enough and the greater danger for the community lies within itself. “Our younger generation will come to church on Sunday and hear sermons of peace and interreligious harmony, but what about the other six days of the week?” Naveed asked. “Not a day goes by when they don’t hear of killings, people being stoned or burned. What kind of environment are our young people living in?”

Naveed seemed to feel that the only way to combat thoughts of vigilante justice or violent struggle is in Sunday sermons and schools. “The church has never really targeted the younger generation and they should. I’m not sure if the church or the leadership is ready for this, but maybe now, after what has happened in Youhanabad, they will have to be.”

At the time of publishing this article, Shameem Bhatti, who was shot three times and was injured by shrapnel from a bomb, was admitted to hospital. We regret to note that he has died due to his injuries. The death toll from the Christ Church and Roman Catholic Church bombings is now twenty.